Using the Sculpt tool

If you want to sculpt your models even more interactively, you can use the sculpt geometry tool which uses a brush and a mouse or tablet to allow you to sculpt your models. So let's take a look at how this works. We first need to select a polygonal model and then we need to make sure we're in the polygon menu set. Now you can sculpt both nerbs and polygons, but for polygons we need to go into mesh tools, sculpt geometry tool, and then we have our options panel here to the right. And I want to make sure that I open that. And when I do, notice how my cursor changes to a brush, and I can hover my brush over my geometry. Notice how it changes and sticks to the surface of that geometry. Now the control panel for this is pretty important. We have the radius of our brush, we also have the opacity of the brush, and those are 2 important values there, the radius is basically the physical size of this brush, and the opacity is the strength.

So if I were to just left click and drag on this model, you can see that well, it's digging a pretty deep gauge in the model. I'm going to undo that. And let's go ahead and tone this down a bit. The first thing I'm going to do is just drop my opacity by quite a bit, and that way it kind of softens the brush. So you can see now I've got a much softer action. Again I'm going to undo that. And then we can also change the radius of our brush. Now if I want, I can dial this up or down using the slider. I can type in a number. But probably the most interactive way of doing this is to just hold down the b key or the letter b.

And when I do that, notice how my brush icon changes and I can just drag left or right to size the brush however I want, and now I can sculpt a little bit more finely. Now we have a number of different options for our sculpt parameters. By default, it's on push, which means I'm pushing, geometry in. We also have pull. Okay, so I undid this. We can actually pull geometry out. Smooth, we can smooth out our geometry.

We can relax or pinch geometry, great for creating creases or softening out a model. We can also push geometry around so we can slide the geometry. So you can see how I can actually slide my edges back and forth. It's a great way to rearrange your geometry. Now we also have a brush strength control and this works in conjunction with this opacity. So higher strength will give you more effect but opacity will tone that down. So a lot of times, you can pick one or the other.

I tend to work with the opacity, but if you want, you can work with brush straight. Now in addition to this, we have what's called a stroke command. You can see how I can change the way that my stroke works. Probably the most important one is reflection. If I click that on, now I get 2 brushes and this is very similar to reflection in Soft Select in that I can actually now reflect around my model. I can reflect around y, z or x.

And I'm going to go ahead and reflect around x because that's left and right. So if I wanted to make his cheeks bigger for example I could reflect around x and turn on pull and then I can puff out his cheeks if I wanted to. Now in addition to this, we also have pressure controls. So if you actually have a tablet, you can turn on your stylus pressure, and then map it to any one of those values. So as you can see, the sculpt geometry tool is a very sophisticated way of sculpting your models interactively.

And the more you get comfortable with this, you'll find that you can make some really highly realistic and interesting models.